A Knot in the Grain

by Robin McKinley

  “—if you felt like it. I’d rather you didn’t sue, of course, but there’s no doubt that old Walker’s heirs heard about the highway plans and figured they’d better scratch together some cooperation quick to realize anything at all out of the property.”

  “But we like it here,” said Dad, and Annabelle could hear that he meant it; that it was no longer just that he and Mom had gotten a good price for the house.

  “Good. Terrific. I’ll send you copies of sample letters tomorrow. In fact, I’ll bring them around. I suppose I don’t need to tell you not to copy them straight out? Even congresspeople aren’t so stupid that they don’t notice—or their secretaries notice for them—the same letter coming in a hundred times. But” —and Annabelle could hear the change of tone, back to general dinner party conversation—“it’s in all our interests to preserve the best cornfield in New York State.” Annabelle took her cue, and carried the platter of fresh corn into the dining room.

  The house was fuller of people after that—more like it had been in the old house, except these people were all grownups. Dad had always had colleagues he brought home, tweedy people with short hair, blue-jeaned people with shaggy hair. Mom had a stranger assortment of friends, from the dour brown lady who ran the local Laundromat (which Mom hadn’t used since the first six months they’d lived in that town, till the washing machine went in), whose thick East Indian accent baby Annabelle was the first to understand, to various arts and crafts types, some of whom showed up clinking with beaded hair and bracelets and talked about auras and past lives. Now they had political activists—polite political activists, with neat hair and polo shirts, but with the gleam in the eye and the edge to the voice that told you what they really were.

  Annabelle painted a few posters and stuffed some envelopes, but as much as she was growing to love her riverside walk, she could not persuade herself that she cared enough to get really involved. It wasn’t that she still hoped that if things didn’t work out here, they could go back to their old lives; they couldn’t. The new people were in their old house—Bridget said they had repapered most of the downstairs, and taken out the old mock chandelier in the living room and put in track lighting—you didn’t get to go back. Annabelle knew that. Maybe if there had been some kids her own age involved in this highway thing; there probably were; but she didn’t know where they were or what they did, and she was too—proud? discouraged? alienated?—to go to the effort of asking.

  She knew her parents were worrying about her, but she also knew that so long as she didn’t make a show of being disoriented or unhappy, they would leave her alone a while longer. So she went on taking care of the garden, and going to the library, and ignoring the implications of the box in the closet that she believed she didn’t really believe in, and smiling occasionally even if she didn’t mean it. Enough to keep her parents from doing anything about worrying about her.

  By the end of August only Bridget was writing to her regularly any more. Annabelle wrote back, but found it hard to have anything to say; weeding the garden wasn’t very interesting, or actually it was interesting, the feel of earth on your hands, dirt under your fingernails, the surprising satisfaction every time a weed came up with that tiny rip that told you you got the roots and not just pulled the top off, the heat, the sun, the bugs, the occasional whiff of cool river—but it didn’t go in a letter very well. It was what kept Annabelle going, but it wasn’t anything she could talk about. This seemed to be part of not having anyone to talk to. It was very confusing. It was as if she were forgetting something vital. And so she spent more and more of her time in the garden, where talking was superfluous. She finished Great Expectations and began Barchester Towers.

  School was starting in two weeks. The shops all had BACK TO SCHOOL SALE banners in their windows. She stopped herself from wishing for the perfect winter coat, half out of a feeling that Clunker—and the corn, and her shoes—were enough, half out of not being sure she wanted to know what her perfect winter coat really was—and a spare half being angry with herself for thinking consciously about the whole thing. The box in the closet was just an old box full of junk. That’s all. It was her imagination that her closet felt wistful. That she could taste it, like a mist, when she opened the closet door. That it tasted like an old sadness sweeping back in after new hope.

  But the sense of old sadness stayed with her, till she began to feel that it was her own, that it was not that she had left her friends and the shape of her life behind in her old town, but that she had always felt out of place and lonely, and that she was … old, old. That she had felt this way for a long, long time. She had a nightmare, ten days before the first day of school, in which she looked in her mirror and her hair was grey, and she was squinting through thick glasses—one battered earpiece was held in place by a bit of twisted wire—and she stared at herself, knowing she’d done nothing with her life, knowing that she’d given up.… She sat bolt upright, gasping. It was morning; in fact she’d overslept. She’d had a nightmare because she’d overslept, and because school was starting, and she was afraid to go to this new school.

  She got up and dressed, and went outdoors. But even the garden held no peace for her today, and she went on down to the restless river, and turned right, away from the town, and then turned again and retraced her footsteps, stepped over the low wall, and wandered down the main street. It was late enough now that the shops were opening and there were people on the streets; she knew a few to say hello to from her parents’ NO HIGHWAY HERE group, and one young mother surprised her by asking if she’d like to baby-sit. Annabelle remembered her; she had one of those really passionate voices, and her posters were better than anyone else’s. Annabelle, with an armful of delightedly thrashing two-year-old, said, “Oh—sure. I guess.” She’d liked baby-sitting, back in her old life; she’d found the self-absorption of little kids a kick, and had a good time with them—so long as their mothers came home again after a few hours and rescued her.

  She walked on, feeling a new little sense of warmth: something she could do besides hoe and read. Something to do with people, something she understood, changing diapers and keeping little hands away from stoves and closing doors—unlike writing bold angry words she didn’t believe on pieces of paper to be looked at by government officials she couldn’t imagine about the fate of a town she was a stranger to.

  She went to the library and into the young adults’ room and, without thinking, found herself in front of the L’s. The Orange Fairy Book was in; she’d been waiting for that one, before she started The Mayor of Casterbridge. She pulled it down and stood looking at it. It wouldn’t hurt, reading another book of fairy tales. What was she afraid of? She was staring down at the book in her hands and not paying attention to her feet, which had begun moving again; and then the sudden sunlight startled her as she came out from the shelves into the muddle of rec room chairs. She stopped.

  There were only four of them this time. She could feel her face freeze again, but behind the frozenness she felt the longing: someone to talk to, a friend. A friend. And just as suddenly the silence was hovering. Please, it said. And they stood there, she and it, and the four kids looked at the one kid, and Annabelle looked back.

  No, she said to the silence. I’m sorry. But not this. And it went away from her, and she felt the old sadness draw back too; she knew, clearly, at least for that moment, what was hers and what was not. And with that knowledge came a sudden rush of confidence. She stepped forward. “Hi,” she said. “My name’s Annabelle.”

  “Yeah,” said one of the boys. “We know. I’m Alan. My older sister Nancy’s on that NO HIGHWAY HERE committee. I’m sorry I missed the corn, though.”

  “There’s more,” said Annabelle. “All you have to do is stuff a few envelopes and hang around looking hungry. My mom likes feeding people.”

  “My mom too,” said one of the girls. “Everybody but her family.” There was a ripple of laughter—this was obviously an old joke—excluding Annabelle, who suddenl
y wondered if she should have said what she did, so quickly, and to a boy too.

  But before her little bubble of confidence burst into nothing, the other girl spoke over the end of the laughter: “You’re reading Andrew Lang.” It was the girl Annabelle had seen twice before, the one who’d smiled.

  “Oh … I …” began Annabelle, floundering, but the girl went on: “I love the old Lang books, and Wind in the Willows and The Borrowers and stuff. I saw you that day in the library bringing back all my favorites, but Mary was in a hurry or I would have said something. I’m Nell.”

  “Nell’s gonna be a writer,” drawled Alan. Nell scowled.

  “When we were all in fourth grade, Nell wrote a story about a lavender unicorn that sucked nectar out of flowers with its horn, like a bee, you know, and Alan stole it and we all read it,” said the girl who had spoken first.

  “And I’ve never forgiven you,” said Nell.

  “She has a word processor now, the stuff’s harder to steal,” said Alan, unrepentant.

  “You’re starting school with us in a week, aren’t you?” said Nell.

  “Yes,” said Annabelle in a voice much smaller than she’d have liked.

  “You’ll be glad to get out of your house, I think,” said the girl who had the mother who liked to feed everyone but her family, “now that NO HIGHWAY HERE has taken it over.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m glad somebody’s doing something,” said the other boy, who had been silent till now.

  “So am I,” said Nell.

  “Lavender unicorns for peace,” murmured Alan.

  “Let’s get out of here before some librarian comes and snarls at us,” said the second boy.

  “If they didn’t want anybody to sit around here talking, why did they set it up to look like a place where you can sit around and talk?” said Nell, reasonably, but she got up. “You busy?” she said to Annabelle. “We’ll probably go over to the Good Baker. You can sit there forever for the price of a cup of coffee.”

  “Sure,” said Annabelle.

  “Say, you have a car, don’t you?” said Alan. “You bought Pat’s old clunker.”

  “That’s right,” said Annabelle.

  “Be careful,” said Nell. “Alan’s an opportunist. Alan O. Poole, that’s him. You’ve already invited him to dinner, although you may not be aware of it.”

  “I have a car,” said Alan, with dignity, as they threaded their way through the shelves.

  “You have a chassis on four wheels,” said the other girl. “There’s a difference.”

  “Hush,” said Nell, and they went through the library lobby, where the one librarian on duty looked at them warily over her spectacles.

  Annabelle went home in the late afternoon, her mind in a whirl. She knew she liked Nell—besides the fact she almost had to like anyone who would admit in public that she still reread The Borrowers the summer before her junior year of high school—and she thought she liked Diana, the other girl. Alan was cute, but he knew it, which Annabelle didn’t like, but Nell seemed to think he was a good guy anyway. The other boy, Frank, seemed to see the worst sides of things—but she kind of understood that, and it wasn’t as if he was making any of it up or anything. He was the one who told her more about NO HIGHWAY HERE; she supposed she’d heard it before, in snatches, at least, at home, but it was different when someone was explaining it specifically to you, and telling you in such a way that you believed that it was important to him that you paid attention and understood.

  For the first time there was a tiny thread of feeling under her breastbone that said: It would be a pity if the highway came here. If six lanes of hot noisy tarmac crossed just behind the main street, if it cut down all the trees along the river for half a mile, if those meadows and farmers’ fields—even if the farmers were reimbursed, which they were supposed to be—were ruined forever as meadows and farm fields. If all those rabbits and skunks and raccoons and porcupines—even grey squirrels, and she didn’t like grey squirrels—went homeless. And if the air, even at midnight, smelled faintly of exhaust. No. She didn’t want the highway here either. Even if she left this place the day after she got her high school diploma and never came back.

  She lay awake a long time that night, watching the moon through her window, turning on her side to keep it in view for as long as possible. She was meeting Nell and Diana and Mary, whom Annabelle had seen the once several weeks ago, the day after tomorrow. They were going shopping for winter coats, and anything else they might see.

  And a few days after that was the town meeting. Nell and Alan were going, and some of their friends she hadn’t met yet, Linda and George and Kate and some other names she’d forgotten, and Annabelle was thinking about going with them. Then Frank telephoned her that afternoon and asked if she was coming. Of course, she found herself saying, and then Frank said, “Um, well, I’ll look for you there, you know I could tell you who everybody was and stuff. You know, the businessmen who think it would be a good idea, and the green guys who know better.”

  Frank was short, no taller than Annabelle, and he walked funny, kind of crouched and tense. Nothing like Bill. “Sure,” said Annabelle. “Sounds great.”

  Her elation lasted till about halfway through the meeting, when it became obvious to everyone that NO HIGHWAY HERE was losing. The people on the other side were smoother, and they knew how to talk about “helping the economic profile of this rather depressed area.” They made the highway sound like a slight inconvenience for a good causes—what were a few meadows and trees one way or another? It wasn’t as if this town didn’t have lots of meadows and trees. In fact, that was its whole problem, that it didn’t have much else but meadows and trees, and small family farms, well, everyone knew what was happening to small family farms all over the country these days. Local farmers hereabouts were lucky the highway people were interested. When a few of the NO HIGHWAY HERE people began to get angry, they only looked silly. Even Mr. Webster’s facts and statistics—read out as gravely as anyone could read—didn’t make enough of an impression. Not as much of an impression as the sleek leather briefcases and designer three-piece suits of the fellows who murmured the magic word jobs.

  Annabelle lay awake that night too, but she was restless and irritable. Why can’t anything be simple? she thought. Why did my parents have to decide that this was the small town they wanted to move to? Why did I decide to get involved anyway? Who cares? Who needs friends anyway? But she knew better, and the anger drained out of her. Where she was was here, and what she was was involved. She did care. It had happened. And now they were going to get a highway. Her parents had trailed home as silent and depressed as the kids; that was how she knew. If Mr. Webster had said anything to them afterward to give them hope, they would have been grim but not oppressed. Not silent and exhausted, the way they were.

  And then she thought of the box in her closet. She’d been unaware of it since the afternoon in the library when she’d met Nell and the rest. No wonder, she thought, it was all your imagination anyway, you just made something up to keep yourself from being quite so lonely, like a little kid makes up an imaginary friend. I should have named it, she thought. Bess. Or Song of the Wind, or something: a kind of lavender-unicorn name. Well, I’m glad I didn’t give up about my shoes without trying, even if I tried for the wrong reasons.

  She turned over and tried to go to sleep—school was only two days away now, but she thought of it with a much pleasanter sense of alarmed anticipation than she had done a week ago—but sleep refused to come. Instead she fell into what she assumed must be a kind of waking dream: She was dreaming about the box in the closet. I have something for you, she told it. But I’ll need help. Can you get Clunker to start silently, just once?

  She sat up. Nonsense! she said to herself. I’m awake! But she got out of bed anyway, and went to her closet. She could see the cracks around the door, because they were … not quite dark. She opened the door, cautiously. The light was very faint, and grey, almost furtive: pleading. It was th
e marks on the box that were glowing, almost like tiny crooked windows with the end of twilight coming through. Or the beginnings of dawn. Okay, she murmured. We’ll try.

  She put her clothes on, tucked the box under one arm, and crept downstairs. I’ll know in a minute, she thought. When I try to start Clunker. But what am I going to tell my parents if they see me in the driver’s seat at two in the morning with a box with funny-looking marks which may or may not be glowing on it in the passenger seat beside me? She turned the key, and Clunker started at once, as it always did; but with a kind of low purring hum, so faint she could barely hear it, and knew the engine was running only by the vibration through her feet. She put it in gear, and they rolled gently down the driveway.

  I’m sure there’s a right way to do this, she said to the box, but I don’t know what it is. She drove in a wide, ragged circle, depending on what roads there were, and which ones she recognized, all around the town. And every now and then, when she felt that she’d been driving long enough, she stopped, and opened the box, reached in till she touched something, picked it up—all the things were smallish, hand-sized, lumpy, roundish, and very faintly warm to the touch—carried it to the roadside, scrabbled a little in the earth with a screwdriver out of Clunker’s glove compartment, put it in, covered it over, said, “Thanks,” out loud, and went back to the car. The first time she’d put her hand in the box she’d hesitated, remembering that eerie tingle; but nothing of the sort happened this time, except a curious kind of contentment in the touch of the thing against her palm, a sense of cradling, as you might do with a kitten. She remembered a description she’d read somewhere of one of those breeds of hairless cat; the journalist said that she’d thought they were really ugly, but then had held a kitten in her hand, and thought better of her first reaction. It felt like a warm peach, she wrote. The things out of the box were a bit like faintly knobbly warm peaches.